Many readers complain that the financial institutions that are keen to take
their money are less willing to answer legitimate questions.

I should be obliged if you would use your influence to persuade Insurance Choice to refund a £205 premium which I paid them over a year ago.

VD Lancs

This is about IC Home Emergency cover. It was sold by an insurance broker, Insurance Choice, with another company – Corporate Support Solutions – doing the administration, while the underwriting was done by UK General Insurance, with yet another party, Home 3 Assistance, providing the contractors.

With so many strands involved in this cover, my impression is of one arm hardly knowing what the other is doing. In the middle, as ever, is the poor customer.

This policy was designed to cover, among other things, repairs to your plumbing and drainage, as well as an annual boiler service.

You had reported a leaking internal water supply pipe and were given a number for home emergency assistance. After that you found yourself going around in circles with one company saying it hadn’t got your details and asking you to approach another link in the chain to get the relevant details passed across. You complied and were assured the record would be rectified.

Ringing the emergency number again, you discovered this was not the case and it still did not have the details. At your insistence, Home 3 Assistance agreed that an engineer would contact you when in the area to effect the repair. No telephone call materialised despite you waiting in. When you phoned again you asked about your annual boiler service as the policy by then only had two months to run and it hadn’t taken place. You were told this was usually done at the end of the policy term and that someone would contact you to arrange this. Again, no one telephoned back about the repair or about the boiler service. You are a busy staff nurse and did not need all this hassle.

You then acquired permission to employ someone you knew to do the job and for you to bill the insurer for the cost.

As nothing had been done by the policy’s expiry date, on the basis that this was a breach of contract, you requested a reimbursement of the £205 premium. Although you noted the first name of each person you spoke to along the way, later it turned out that not all your calls had been logged and some of the people you had undeniably spoken to seemed to have vanished into thin air. No refund was forthcoming. Then, sadly, your mother died and your fighting spirit waned.

Later you wrote to me. Insurance Choice, the broker, said it hadn’t received a letter you had written to it at its address. However, as a result of my involvement, it reimbursed the £205 . It then recouped the money from the underwriter. In addition, £25 was paid for goodwill.

I felt I should delve a little deeper. To get through to Corporate Support Solutions I several times found myself coming up against a message that the line I wanted was busy and then being taken through the same cul-de-sac-type options again.

There were assertions that the claim had not been valid as you had used your own contractor. I suggested the company check its telephone records. When Home 3 Assistance did this, it did at least acknowledge that it had indeed authorised you to use this contractor. It has now reimbursed the £20 billed by the plumber.

A senior spokesman for UK General Insurance, the underwriter of the policy, said: “We apologise for the poor-quality service Ms Dawson received. We have refunded her premium and offered compensation by way of apology, which has been accepted. We are committed to delivering a high-quality service for all our customers but the service was unacceptable in this particular case and we will make sure this will not happen again.”

All parties need to tie up with each other when dealing with a claim like this. Not surprisingly, you won’t be getting this policy again.